best, under the conditions that then prevailed, to select the
books that seemed to them to contain the truth. It is impossible to
believe that if the majority at these Councils had supposed that such
an account as the account in Genesis of the Creation was mythological,
they would thus have attested its literal truth. It never occurred to
them to doubt it, because they did not understand the principle that,
while a normal event can be accepted, if it is fairly well confirmed,
an abnormal event requires a far greater amount of converging testimony
to confirm it.

If only the clergy could realise that what ordinary laymen like myself
want is a greater elasticity instead of an irrational certainty! if
only instead of feebly trying to save the outworks, which are already
in the hands of the enemy, they would man the walls of the central
fortress! If only they would say plainly that a man could remain a
convinced Christian, and yet not be bound to hold to the literal
accuracy of the account of miraculous incidents recorded in the Bible,
it would be a great relief.

I am myself in the position of thousands of other laymen. I am a
sincere Christian; and yet I regard the Old Testament and the New
Testament alike as the work of fallible men and of poetical minds. I
regard the Old Testament as a noble collection of ancient writings,
containing myths, chronicles, fables, poems, and dramas, the value of
which consists in the intense faith in a personal God and Father with
which it is penetrated.

When I come to the New Testament, I feel myself, in the Gospels,
confronted by the most wonderful personality which has ever drawn
breath upon the earth. I am not in a position to affirm or to deny the
exact truth of the miraculous occurrences there related; but the more
conscious I am of the fallibility, the lack of subtlety, the absence of
trained historical method that the writers display, the more convinced
I am of the essential truth of the Person and teaching of Christ,
because he seems to me a figure so infinitely beyond the intellectual
power of those who described him to have invented or created.

If the authors of the Gospels had been men of delicate literary skill,
of acute philosophical or poetical insight, like Plato or Shakespeare,
then I should be far less convinced of the integral truth of the
record. But the words and sayings of Christ, the ideas which he
disseminated, seem to me so infinitely above the highest